Seagate ST 5.0GB Pocket Hard Drive

Seagate Technology has been in the business of manufacturing disc drives since
1979 and their nearly 30 years of experience has certainly showed with the
vast lineup of storage products. Seagate's present array of products consists
of the Cheetah SCSI, Barracuda SATA, and Momentus PATA series among others.
In 2004 alone, Seagate had shipped over 6.6 petabytes of total storage in the
form of 82.5 million drives! When the Seagate Maxtor merger is completed later
this year there is no doubt that they will form a powerhouse with an approximate
42% market share for hard disk drives. This new Seagate Maxtor duo will be left
to compete with Western Digital, Hitachi, and Toshiba devices among many other
competitors. The Seagate product we are testing today is their 5GB Pocket Hard
Drive. Will this palm-sized drive be the future replacement to flash drives
and other portable media products? Certainly switching over to hard drives will
largely lift some of the manufacturing limits of flash media technology in its
present form but will this new generation offer the longevity and speed that
computer users seek. We hope to answer some of these questions today as we examine
Seagate's 5GB Pocket Hard Drive (ST650211U-RK).

Opening up the Seagate 5.0GB Pocket Hard Drive, the drive itself and a CD containing
the Seagate Toolkit, Windows 98 drivers, and users manual were the only contents.
Seagate's retail product was composed of plastic packaging and on the rear of
the container was the various features and specifications. In addition to the
5GB ST650211U-RK model, Seagate also produces a 6GB ST660211U-RK variant. Unlike
many of Seagate's internal hard drives, the official warranty only lasts on
the Pocket Drive for one year.